Christmas Eve [Nochebuena]

It's been a busy few days. I developed a stonkingly horrible cold, probably due to walking around in the miserable rainy weather. But I'm better now. A couple of days ago we had an evening of carols, mulled wine and mince pies. The latter item was a slight challenge - they're not readily available in Madrid. I had asked Offspring to bring a jar of mincemeat from England, but he claims he never got the message. Fortunately, there's a shop called 'The Things You Miss' that sells mundane British brands that nobody else stocks, and so we got two jars of Robertson's mincemeat and some ready-made pastry. I spent a happy couple of hours building and baking 24 mince pies. (In case you don't know: it's a small pie containing 'mincemeat' - there's no actual meat in this stuff, it's made from fruit, dried peel, suet and sugar and it's sweet, lumpy and gooey).

Yesterday's mission was to buy a suckling pig. I'd noticed that El Corte Ingles's price had shot up from about 12 Euros a kilo to 20, so we headed off to the market instead and got one for 14 Euros a kilo. I'll be cooking this later today: we're having the big feast early on Christmas Eve, rather than starting at midnight as the Spanish do!